Many of you know that I occasionally try to wrap my head around various aspects of the education blogosphere. In the past I've written about hubs and superhubs. I've also sometimes attempted to identify and quantify some of the most popular edublogs:

Below is my latest attempt. I made a few changes from last time, which I describe after the table. Authority and rank are from Technorati as of June 2. Clicking on each blog name will take you to its Technorati page.

This time I only included blogs that predominantly post about P-12 education. No higher education blogs. No blogs that are mostly about training, software tools, or other topics with an occasional P-12related post. No education news channels that happen to have an RSS feed. Just 'pure' P-12 blogs. I was on the fence about four blogs on the chart; those are marked with an asterisk. I included blogs 51 to 54 in case you think those four should not have been included.

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I gave up monitoring the several thousand blogs on my previous list. There were just too many to catalog and also too many newcomers. There are over 100,000 edublogs!

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I feel fairly confident about the accuracy of this list. I considered listing the top 100 but was not as confident about blogs 70 to 100 because I kept finding new ones in that range.

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If I missed you, I'm sorry. Please let me know for next time. If you don't like or disagree with my selection criteria, feel free to make your own list. It would be interesting to compare yours with this one.

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The very notion of what constitutes a 'top' edublog is very personal and individual (see, e.g., posts by Stephen Downes and Peter Rock as well as the numerous comments regarding my last two attempts). Also, Technorati has a number of issues, but no one has yet suggested a more viable alternative. There are many, many great blogs not on this list. While a number of people are finding value in the blogs in this table, some excellent writing is occurring on blogs with lower authority. Read and write blogs for your own reasons rather than worrying about the numbers.

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Other lists of top edublogs

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Other attempts have been made to catalog the top edublogs. Of note are the following:

Only 19 of the top 50 blogs in the chart above are on Alltop Education. Interestingly, I also discovered that at least 9 of the blogs on Alltop Education have an authority of less than 26, meaning that they have less than one inbound link per week.

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Blogs with big gains in authority

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Take heart, bloggers who want more readers / links! As the chart below shows, a number of the blogs on this list had large gains in authority over the past 11 months. Some of the top blogs (including Students 2.0, Angela Maiers, and Eduwonkette) didn't even exist a year ago.

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Final thoughts

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As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts or reactions regarding this post. I am deeply honored that so many of you choose to read my blogs, appreciate any and all feedback, and look forward to the conversation!